Israeli video data co viisights raises $1.2m

The startup has developed a video data management and intelligence platform to provide data as a service (DAAS) analytics.

Israeli video intelligence startup viisights has closed $1.2 million in seed funding led by TheTime together with Maxfield Capital, ASF Ventures and LETA Capital. The Tel Aviv-based company will use the funds to enhance its core technology and for team expansion.

Video content is popular like never before, and according to emarketer research in 2015 adults spend more than 5.5 hours each day watching video and more than 1:16 hours per day watching digital video. Yet digital video monetization potential is behind display due to shortage in high quality discoverable inventory, which cause publishers revenues to be generated from small portion of their entire video content library. User generated content is barely discoverable and monetized, targeting technology is limited and there are no acceptable industry standards for handling fraud and measurement.

viisights has developed a video data management and intelligence platform provides data as a service (DAAS) analytics solutions for content discovery, brand safety and targeting. The platform offers a one-stop-shop for video metadata and user-profile management. viisights expands the revenues for publishers with large video content libraries and delivers higher quality video ad targeting data for advertisers.

viisights co-founder and CEO Asaf Birenzvieg said, “We have realized that in order to better monetize video content, a better content discovery capability is a must, while improved targeting will make the leap step over the incumbent first generation platforms. Most of the publishers’ ad revenues are generated from content that represents very small portion of their video library. The long tail is indeed very long. We are working hard to change that by providing existing content and targeting platforms the right wisdom and data for optimal performance within the video environment. The US digital video ad spending market is forecasted to be $9.59 billlion for 2016 (source: emarketer, March 2015) with significant growth year over year, industry leaders will have to show competitive advantage in order to gain greater piece from that pie, viisights is there to help them."

viisights co-founder and chief scientist Simon Polak said, "viisights core technology is about “video understanding” - “Our unique technology that understands what any type of video content is about and to describe in great detail the content of various scenes. Our algorithms work top-down, extracting high-level concepts, in a way very similar to how humans process and understand content. For example: we can identify sports event like football and basketball, themes like romantic scene or dancing. This innovative approach is very different from the technologies used in the market which approach the problem bottom-up by breaking the content into objects and leave it to the upper layer service to figure out the complete picture."